The present invention relates to a teaching aid apparatus and method and, more particularly, to a teaching aid and method to assist students in developing writing skills while learning the alphabet.
In today's public schools, students and teachers are under constant pressure to perform well on standardized tests. Due to the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2001), students are required to meet a set standard or benchmark for achievement. Students who do not succeed in meeting this standard are recommended for remediation, specialized services, or retention. Teachers whose students do not meet this standard, are held accountable for their students' performances, due to their own teaching practices. As this pressure to teach more and more information in a single school year grows, students cannot afford to fall behind.
While public school teachers are obligated by contract to teach the curriculum set by the state, they are also obligated to meet the needs each individual student. Students are unique individuals, with different interests, initial skills, strengths, weaknesses, and learning modalities. Not every student learns the same way as their peers, and teachers need to recognize and embrace these differences in their students.
According to the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills Program (DIBELS, 2003), the end of kindergarten benchmark requires children to be able to read nonsense words at a rate of 25 correct sounds in one minute and have a letter naming fluency of 40 correct letter names read in one minute in order to be in the “low risk” category. Children are also expected to enter first grade reading approximately 40-50 high frequency words and be able to decode regular Consonant-Vowel-Consonant words. It is generally recognized that readers who are unable to recognize letters, choose not to read at all.
Students who do not have these basic skills become labored readers and can be labeled as at-risk. At-risk readers tend to be frustrated with reading, read below-grade level, and in some cases get “stuck” in a lower component of Reading First (2003). Since Reading First (2003) components build on one another, a child that is struggling with phonemic awareness does not have the skills to build these letters into phonological words, which in turn, would lead to fluency, building vocabulary, and comprehension in reading. If comprehension is the highest level of understanding text, a child with low letter recognition skills will be limited in comprehension. Letter recognition skills are the building blocks to a solid reading foundation.
The present invention contemplates provision of a teaching aid and a method of assisting students in the development of letter recognition and writing skills through the use of interdisciplinary units, materials with multiple uses and manipulatives that appeal to different senses and learning intelligences.